Best Experienced With: Pearl Jam: Yellow Ledbetter
(please right click the link below to open the suggested background music for this evening’s treatise in a new window…WAIT FOR IT…along)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs8y3kneqrs
Outside of the long paragraphs with seemingly endless punctuation that power the hamster wheel daily, have not thought about William Faulkner in a while. Over the past week, The Random smashed Faulkner into me three times. First when his town in Mississippi voted to allow beer sales for the first time in fifty years. Second time was when a friend compared Rick Bragg’s style to Faulkner this afternoon. Third time was this evening when the NY Times had an article on the origin of Faulkner’s character names. They were from a list of real slave names he found in his barn. And Faulkner assigned the slave names to white characters. Brilliant!
Clearly the ghost of Faulkner is in The Attic this evening. To honor Mr. Faulkner, we will post some of his prose on the bulletin board and we will ruin the Faulkner quotations by ending each in a random preposition. All hail Faulkner.
“Caddy held me and I could hear us all, and the darkness, and something I could smell. And then I could see the windows, where the trees were buzzing. Then the dark began to go in smooth, bright shapes, like it always does, even when Caddy says that I have been asleep….WAIT FOR IT…………for.”
“And maybe when He says Rise the eyes will come floating up too, out of the deep quiet and the sleep, to look on glory. And after a while the flat irons would come floating up. I hid them under the end of the bridge and went back and leaned on the rail…….WAIT FOR IT……..…to”
“They lead beautiful lives, women. Lives not only divorced from, but irrevocably excommunicated from, all reality………WAIT FOR IT………at.”
“I could not be a virgin, with so many of them walking along in the shadows and whispering with their soft girl voices lingering in the shadowy places and the words coming out and perfume and eyes you could feel not see, but if it was that simple to do it wouldn’t be anything and if it wasn’t anything, what was I……..WAIT FOR IT……oh, hell…we can’t wait for it on this one because it goes on forever and ever and ever and ever……………….”
Faulkner prose should always go on forever and ever and ever and ever. As the frog quickly learned from the scorpion, you cannot change the nature of things. Nor should we try. All hail Faulkner.
We appear to have some prepositions left over from our Faulkner fun. How about if we stack them in a nice pile right here for the next time we choose to end our sentences in prepositions?
In
Via
Past
Under
Toward
Outside
Opposite
Regarding
Underneath
The Mind of Mully
Once I saw her
Mumblemumblemumble
Mumblemumblemumble
I want to leave it again……..yeah
This is the Rick Bragg book referenced above. It is the finest non-fiction book I have read in twenty years. It will make you laugh, cry, and think. Thus, it is the perfect book. I double dog dare you to not cry when you read pages 74 and 75 and get to the part where she says “he raises his arms to show her how brave he is”. Double dog dare. All hail Bragg.
Make me cry, Stone………….
Night
Mind of Mully Biz Haus Shoppe 